Stay out of the box!

Monthly Archives: June 2017

I close my eyes riding the wind through the tenses of my life. Filtered images fly through the dark illuminating scenes through the scent of memory and hope.

I know not where the wind will take me, nor the speed, for there’s a world of difference between the breeze and the gale, but they’re mine none the less.

The sounds of my past aren’t audible. They come through experiences that thunder or whisper to my soul. Interrupted only by the decibels of reality rumbling across my conscientious. The light rain on the tin roof has more color in mind than in my world.

It’s like the sound of rubber rolling on wet asphalt triggers a silence that brings a colorful emotion that’s silent, but heard. Felt in that separate place between memory and hope.

I can’t live here in this darkness full of light, sound, and smells. I can’t push the world far enough away. I can close my eyes and smile, or cry for dreams long past, or hopes that’ve died. Either way the beauty isn’t lost, it’s in me.

Denying God is a choice for some folks. This choice has many different factors, most of which are not evil. The roots of disbelief are varied and don’t have as much to do with Satan as they do with our psychology.

I’ll stay as far from the atheist vs theist movement as much as possible. These two groups, in my eyes, are the charismatic extremes of the normal everyday believer or non believer. While one labors to live today within an Old Testament reality the other spends an inordinate amount of time talking about the crusades. Neither of these two will help anyone.

I have learned that the middle road scenery is a more realistic journey. I have to stay focused on the path because life seems to push us to extremes. I’m not afraid of God or biology, and for me, it’s what we’re all made of.

At it’s purest form God seems to be the “thing” we question or celebrate every time something good or bad happens to us. After a series of unfortunate events we may question “Why me!” Maybe we hit a string of luck and feel fortunate that somehow it was our turn. Either way, luck, good or bad, assumes an external control.

The strange thing is that whether you believe or don’t, there’s a nagging “something” within the human condition that questions our place in the world. A believer who questions their faith during times of trial, or the non believer who rationalizes events in their life, both rely on something invisible to the average human condition of understanding. Both experience events beyond their understanding and question “why”.

I’m not making a case for or against believing or non belief. I’m simply pointing to the fact that we share this space of unknown consequence. We experience things beyond or control or understanding and attempt to fill it with faith or facts. When both of these fail it seems it’s just us. Somehow we are the unfortunate or fortunate ones.

This space is where the disagreement comes and folks have preyed (no pun intended) on probably forever in human history. It’s almost like I wish we could define for folks what it was like “pre-religious”. Like we do for pre-industrialization. From the accounts we have, it was a violent existence. I’m not saying religion saved the world , it seems it capitalized on humans ability to organize for collective survival. However, we are certainly better off as humans for exploring our spiritual side, it’s when it became a vocation we strayed.

Origins are the key. It’s from these points we can move foreword with coherence. We won’t change institutional religion in government, they’re mutually exclusive at this point, we’d have to eliminate both and that’s not gonna happen. We can enlighten folks on the history of our humanity so that they may exercise their spirituality more responsibly.

So whoever or whatever we fill that void with, we have to leave room for respect and honesty. When I say honesty I don’t mean facts, I mean feelings. I am in the middle between facts and feelings, not to be objective, although that helps, but I think the middle is the space where balance rules.

Hitting folks over the head with a Bible or Quran just makes folks numb. Just like throwing our a barrage of scientific facts to counter someone’s spiritual sensibilities shuts down dialog. Someone had to stand in the gap of reason.

Religion is not spirituality and science is not intelligence. It makes no sense that God would subjugate his creation, just as it makes no sense science would reject possibility. Between the two most of us live, and within the two we survive our own intellectual and spiritual ignorance. And this is life.